Automatically scanning for product tag changes

[samsungjoe]

What is the best practice to automatically scan for product tag changes?

We have an app that relies on product tags, and need to get (near) real-time updates to product tags or new products. 

Thank you,

Joe

[Tomas_K]

Can you elaborate more on what your app does? Is it a custom app or public?

[samsungjoe]

We have let shoppers buy via text messaging using the product tag. For example "buy <tagid>"

Thus we need to know when a merchant updates his tags or adds a new product+tag.

Currently we look at the updated_at field for each product through a cron script every 2 hours. We'd like to do this every 1-2 mins though, and this approach doesn't really scale when merchants have thousands of products.

[Tomas_K · Accepted solution]

In my opinion WebHooks would fit your use case. From your app you can subscribe to events which happen in merchants store.  Checkout, cart, inventory updates, removals etc.  Here is a link to documentation:
https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/rest/reference/events/webhook?api[version]=2020-04

Good luck

[samsungjoe]

Thank you! We'll try this and let you know